


it's not much...

by maggierachael



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: ManDadlorian, and yodito appreciates his efforts, bb boy can't sleep and dad's a softie, beskar helmet be damned, but have at it anyway, but he's trying his hardest anyway, i'm soft for skin to skin contact okay, just a whole bunch of domestic bullshit, metal dad doesn't know how to dad, post ep5 or 6 i guess?, this is one hundred percent unedited nonsense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-19
Updated: 2019-12-19
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:07:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21863464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maggierachael/pseuds/maggierachael
Summary: ...but my money’s on you.I said I wasn’t going to write Star Wars fic ever again, but then The Mandalorian came around and made me soft for this distressed dad and his son so HERE WE ARE.Vaguely inspired by Internet headcanons and one too many times listening to Dessa’s “Dixon’s Girl” while thinking about Dyn. Enjoy.
Relationships: Baby Yoda & The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV), The Mandalorian & Baby Yoda
Comments: 12
Kudos: 316





	it's not much...

It’s a soft whimpering that wakes Dyn in the middle of the night. 

Not that he ever really got a good night’s sleep in the sad, blanket-covered slab of beskar he called a bunk, but this time was different. This time, it wasn’t the loud drone of the ship’s processing core that woke him as it flew the Razor Crest through hyperspace, or the occasional rattle of the bunk’s overhead panel that hadn’t quite been replaced correctly post-Jawa deconstruction. 

No, the noise wasn’t mechanical this time. It was sentient. 

The hunter awakens with a groan, shifting over onto his sidebody, half-convinced he’s still dreaming. He sees nothing at first, the darkness of the ship’s lower levels penetrated only by the occasional blink of some system’s onboard lights. It’s got to be a dream, he thinks — recurring paranoia at the back of his mind about the child he’d rescued being taken in the middle of the night, even though they were busy sailing through hyperspace. (Cara had called it paternal instincts when he’d told her, much as Dyn protested.) He’s overreacting, not for the first time since he’d saved his tiny, green ward from who knows what kind of fate. He’s overreacting, and he needs to go back to sleep before they reach their destination. 

Then he sees it - almost invisible in the darkness of the night, until his head tilts down to the floor and his eyes connect with a pair of little brown ones, shining like polished steel. 

The child was standing at the edge of his bed, whimpering like any other scared infant in the galaxy. 

He’d been good about sleeping in his bassinet since they’d been on the run, so long as Dyn tucked him in tight and let him have the old Corellian stuffie he’d nicked from a junk shop somewhere in the last star system. (God knows how he’d gotten ahold of it, but Dyn had learned very quickly to not ask questions when it came to this particular infant. They usually came with a lot of wailing.) The soft snoring the kid let out was another matter entirely, but Dyn had gotten good at ignoring it. At least the snoring meant he was sleeping soundly. Better than the hunter ever could. 

Now, the stuffed toy is nowhere to be seen, and the tiny thing is almost swallowed by the dirt brown robes he wears as he stands next to the bunk, much too small to reach the edge and climb up. His big brown eyes stare up at Dyn as the floppy green sails he calls ears point in the opposite direction, with a look on his face that told his caretaker he was anything but happy. 

Dyn half-panics that the kid can see his face - he’d practically fallen asleep on his feet after eating what little rations still remained on the ship, not bothering to replace his helmet - but the fear quickly redirects itself to the fact that the little squirt is shaking like a leaf in a thunderstorm. Dyn can see it even in the dim light of the cabin, and something spikes through his veins like he’d just shot up a dose of adrenaline. His ward is afraid. 

Of what, the hunter can’t place, but something out there scared him half to death. Something Dyn couldn’t protect him from. Something dark and shadowy that adults could never see, only noticeable by eyes that hadn’t become weary of the dangers of the world. 

Tears start to flood the little one’s eyes as he whimpers once more, and something cracks firmly in two deep inside the bounty hunter’s chest. 

Helmet be damned. 

“Come here, you little nerfherder.”

He knows he shouldn’t do it. Knows he shouldn’t let the kid form habits when their future together was so uncertain. Knows that every parental action he takes is another one that will hurt him if they’re ever separated. But he does it anyway. 

Strong hands reach down to hoist the child up into the bunk, cries ceasing almost immediately as Dyn sits up and cradles the kid to his chest. He can feel tears soak into the fatigues he wears to sleep as the baby burrows its face into them, his entire tiny body still shaking. The feeling tugs at something deep in the bounty hunter’s heart, and he runs his hand up and down its back as soothingly as he can manage. 

“It’s alright.” Dyn’s voice is barely a whisper, the sound still rough with sleep. “You’re alright.” 

The words don’t seem to do much of anything, the tears still coming and going in shaky breaths from the child. (So much for sounding like a proper caregiver, Dyn thinks.) He presses his hand more firmly against the child’s back, cradling him as close as he possibly can without causing him harm, tucking his knees to his chest and his head to his heart to let the kid know that he was there for him, that he’d protect him despite everything. 

He realized that the kid had probably only had a nightmare that had woken him up - he was young, kids got nightmares. But they’d been on the run for weeks, their longest stop being the nearly ill-fated rest on Sorgan that Dyn still didn’t like to talk about. The kid was probably as rattled as he was, come to think of it. He’d been through a lot - perhaps more than Dyn himself - and that seemed like more than reason enough to give him night terrors. A life on the run was no life for an infant. 

Dyn doesn’t know how to care for a scared child. He’d been one once, but that was long ago. Years of hardship had beaten that out of him, and now all that was left was a battle-hardened man with what some would call a death wish, cradling the most dangerous bounty in the galaxy while it sobbed into his chest. 

What he didn’t realize was that, despite all the years and the wars and the nasty, poorly-healed blaster scars, his heart - the heart of a decent, compassionate man - hadn’t changed one tiny bit. 

Just as he thinks he’s out of options, as he wishes that he could simply banish the nightmares from the boy’s mind with a blaster shot or a well-placed word, something comes to him. It’s simple, the smallest of actions that might be able to ease the ache in both parties’ hearts, but it sticks in Dyn’s brain like tar. Something tells him it’s the flicker of a memory long past, but he can’t be sure of that. All he knows is that he needs to sit up further, enough that he can extend his knees and brace himself to rock his torso back and forth, swaying like the purple seas on Dantooine as he whispers to the kid. 

“It’s okay,” he says over and over again. “I’ve got you. No one can hurt you.” 

For a brief moment, a wish flickered in the bounty hunter’s chest, lit and then extinguished like a flame on a windy night. It wasn’t fully formed, only snatches of an idea brought on by the feeling of rocking a whimpering foundling against his chest in the middle of the night. A colony planet, on the farthest edge of the outer rim. Safety - enough for the child to play with others his own age. The feeling of being able to rest for more than the briefest of moments. Settling in a way that bounty hunters usually don’t settle. 

“You’re safe with me. I’ve got you.”

Something in the back of Dyn’s mind tells him that he’d never spoken truer words in his life. 

Much to his shock, the swaying seems to work. Silence envelopes the two fugitives as the child’s cries cease, quieting into nothing as he squirms to get comfortable. Dyn is able to relax back against the frame of the uncomfortable bunk, still half sat-up to support the child, whose face was no longer burrowed into his shirt, but who seemed to be deliberately looking everywhere but at his face. Some deeper thought passes through the hunter’s mind about that, but it flees away as he intently watches the child for any signs that it might still be upset. 

There seem to be none left, as he lets out a coo that sends a fuzzy feeling through the hunter’s veins to replace the terrified adrenaline from earlier. He kneads the soft fabric of Dyn’s shirt in his tiny hands, not unlike the loth cat that an infinitesimal part of Dyn’s brain remembers having as a child. He shifts just enough to rest his head in the V where his caretaker’s shirt exposes his skin, and Dyn can feel the tiniest of sighs leave the baby’s body as it settles into him. He can feel the child go boneless against him as he slips back into sleep, and it’s the greatest relief in the galaxy to him when the shivering finally stops. 

It isn’t until he hears the sound of soft snoring that Dyn is able to sink into the first deep sleep he’s had in years.

**Author's Note:**

> I've seen this "baby Yoda sleeps with Dyn instead of in his cradle" thing written a hundred times before, but the fam was watching episode seven again last night and the first line popped into my head, and well...here we are. This is my way of healing after that shit on Navarro. ‾\\_(ツ)_/‾


End file.
